Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [744]
In his native Germany, Roebling had studied architecture, hydraulics, and bridge construction—and philosophy, with Hegel, who thought Roebling one of his brightest pupils. In 1831 he had migrated to the United States, joined a farming colony, worked as a canal engineer, and developed a wire cable, which he used in building iron bridges that allowed America’s proliferating rail lines to surmount its abundant rivers. At Niagara Falls locomotives shuttled serenely across the great gorge on Roebling’s breathtaking International Suspension Bridge. Contacted by promoters of the East River crossing, Roebling laid out a magisterial plan. He would build the longest suspension bridge in the world, eighty feet in width (as spacious as Broadway, he liked to point out) with plenty of room for cable cars. The span would be supported by steel cables strung over two massive masonry towers—which if built would be the largest structures ever built on the North American continent—and the cables would be rooted to onshore sevenstory stone anchorages.
If technical obstacles seemed bridgeable, political currents remained treacherous. In 1867, when William Kingsley broached the idea of chartering the New York Bridge Company, he turned to State Senator Henry Cruse Murphy, point man in Albany for Brooklyn’s Democrats. Son of a Brooklyn judge, Murphy had had a distinguished legal and diplomatic career, helped found the Brooklyn Eagle back in 1841, served as Brooklyn’s mayor and congressman, and taken part in the city’s economic evolution, most recently as a developer of Coney Island (another potential bridge beneficiary).
Murphy designed a charter for the Bridge Company that would fix its capital stock at five million dollars and authorize the City of Brooklyn to subscribe three millions’ worth and the City of New York one-and-a-half million, with the rest to be taken up by private shareholders. Brooklyn authorities, he knew, would do their part. The key problem lay in Manhattan, where the phalanx of promoters and politicians booming the upper island worried a bridge would siphon off potential home buyers. In addition, New York warehouse owners feared loss of business, and its taxpayers fretted at the enormous costs involved. But only one voice counted in the end, and it belonged to William M. Tweed. To find out if New York aldermen would accept a half-price deal, Murphy paid Tweed a visit. Tweed allowed as how the aldermen would probably come around if encouraged by sixty thousand dollars or so. Murphy authorized the expenditure—according to Tweed, though Murphy denied the story—and Kingsley provided the cash, carried over from Brooklyn in a carpetbag.
To recompense Tweed, hardly interested in such paltry rewards, Kingsley bought up and gave over roughly half the outstanding private stock to the Boss and two Tammany colleagues. The stock was incredibly valuable because under Murphy’s charter, only private stockholders had voting rights. The cities, which would put up 90 percent of the capital, were to be, in the truest sense, dummy partners. For Tweed, this opened up magnificent vistas—jobs for constituents, kickbacks from contractors—a treasure chest that would more than offset any potential damage to his uptown investments.
This tawdry but obligatory business behind them, the Bridge Company (Henry Murphy, president; William Kingsley, chief contractor) set to work. Roebling, named chief engineer in 1867, gathered a crack crew and had just about completed preliminary planning when, on June 28, 1869, an accident crushed the tip of his foot, which led to lockjaw, seizures, a coma, and death on July 22. The company passed the